Startups

End of the road? Path's journey might be cut short by the less scrupulous social networks

I'm a huge fan of Path, the social network that's designed for a small circle of friends.

Launched in 2010, it's been through a couple of versions and loads of bad press. First it let you have 50 connections, but that just seemed to confuse everybody. That number has now grown to 150 but the premise is the same –… Read More

London taxi drivers are the new London Underground drivers – going on strike over new technology. Up to 12,000 cabbies are expected to strike tomorrow.

The new technology in this instance is a humble smartphone app called Uber. The app uses GPS to calculate the time a journey has taken and the distance a driver has gone, works out a price and then bills it direct to the user’s smartphone. The cabbies say it functions as a taxi meter, and therefore is illegal. It’s all going to court soon, but the taxi drivers want to keep the… Read More

What's Alibaba? It's one of dozens of internet giants you haven't heard of.

There's been a big stir this week, caused by the float of Alibaba.com, a website that most of us have never heard of, that is about to have a mammoth IPO on the New York stock exchange. Analysts are talking about a £10 billion valuation.

While big tech floats are nothing new, Alibaba is a rock-solid, established business that's been going for years. It's basically the Chinese Amazon – it flogged £146 billion worth of stuff last year, and made £1.9 billion in profit on those sales.

Often, the cry goes up from politicians and the tech press: "Where is the British Google?" It's a question worth asking. Why hasn't Britain created a world-beating tech startup?

People often look to the cluster of "social media gurus" and other assorted charlatans clustered around Tech City in Shoreditch, expecting that magically an international brand will appear if enough hype is generated.

Where the real British tech boom is coming is in the unsexy world of online financial services. According to a report out today from Accenture, British financial technology firms are the fastest growing in the world.

Have you seen the new speed-reading app? It’s pretty cool. Turns out there’s something odd about the way our eyes move over words, and a group of app creators, having clocked this, have been able to produce something that can – they say – triple reading speed. Yes, triple it.

The secret is that we only need a quick glance at the “optimal recognition point” of a word to understand it – that's the two or three letters in the centre. This is the discovery behind Spritz, an… Read More

Pebble announced its second smart watch last week, almost a year to the day after its first attempt hit wrists around the world, and way after the rest of the world thought Apple was going to make its first move.

18 months ago, San Fransico-based Pebble broke all records on the crowd funding website Kickstarter by becoming the fastest-ever funded project. Little more than a good idea with a prototype and a cool video, Pebble's initial funding goal was $100,000. They hit that target in less than two… Read More

Another day, another ludicrously high valuation for a pre-revenue startup. This time, it's photo-sharing service Snapchat, which has turned down a $3 billion dollar offer from Facebook. For those not in the know, Snapchat is a service that lets people share messages or pictures, which then auto-delete a few seconds later. It's often used for sexual messaging, I'm reliably informed.

I'm used to high valuations for things I don't care about, but putting that price on Snapchat is completely stupid. None of the usual arguments for this sort of valuation for a startup really apply here. The most common of these is that the the data you… Read More

Facebook is a force for good. Perhaps one of the most transformative forces for good we will see in our lifetimes. And far from being the malevolent manboy of Aaron Sorkin’s invention, Mark Zuckerberg is one of a handful of billionaire geniuses to have emerged from the maelstrom of venture funding. Sorkin portrayed the Facebook CEO as someone driven by revenge and the squalid itch to join a Harvard final club and score some hot chicks. It’s an easy motivation to understand – but it was never what drove Mark Zuckerberg. As uncomfortable (and sometimes embarrassing) as his “change the world” rhetoric can be, he really believes it.

Something sinister is brewing in Silicon Valley. It involves 23AndMe, the human genomics startup co-founded by Sergey Brin’s soon-to-be ex-wife Anne Wojcicki. The company, whose investors include Google Ventures – Google’s investment arm – has patented a gene calculator to allow people to pick and choose the physical traits of their future child. Eugenics is suddenly the hot new Silicon Valley plan.

The system proposed by 23AndMe in its patent filing – submitted in December 2008 but just made public – compares your genes to others in a database to recommend a mating match which would produce a child with… Read More